Posted
by
timothyon Thursday August 19, 2010 @03:49PM
from the 0s-are-rounder-1s-more-linear dept.

nk497 writes "Veteran Hi-Fi journalist Malcolm Steward has pushed newfangled Super SATA cables via his blog as a way to improve the sound quality of music, saying: 'My only guess is that the Super SATAs reject interference significantly better than the standard cables and in so doing lower the noise floor revealing greater low-level musical detail and presentational improvements in the soundstage and the "air" around instruments.' If that doesn't sound right to you, you're not alone. As PC Pro blogger Sasha Muller argues: 'How on earth can a SATA cable delivering 0s and 1s to their respective destination have any effect on those 0s and 1s? The answer is, it can't. Unless it's a magical one made of pixie shoes.' So maybe don't invest in Super SATA cables unless you have proof they're magical first."

I have disabled Comments on this post so that respectable visitors do not have to read the remarks made by a small number of extremely ignorant, rude, malicious and disingenuous individuals who cannot tolerate people expressing opinions that do not concur with their own.

Looks like someone commented about how asinine that the premise these cables could matter to sound quality.

I have disabled Comments on this post so that people who believe everything I tell them do not have to read remarks made by a large number of scientifically and technically literate individuals who cannot tolerate people lying to and defrauding their customers.

The Super SATA cables I recently tested proved to be real shockers. Every logical thought was telling me that the wires that transmit the raw digital data between a hard disk and the motherboard in a NAS simply could not influence the sound that emerged from the player – after the music has already subsequently passed through metres of CAT5.

But they do.

I listened to the cables in my NAS feeding my Naim HDX/DAC/XPS and clearly identified easily perceptible improvements through my highly revealing active Naim DBL system. Quite what it is that wrought these improvements I do not know. My only guess is that the Super SATAs reject interference significantly better than the standard cables and in so doing lower the noise floor revealing greater low-level musical detail and presentational improvements in the soundstage and the ‘air’ around instruments.

The most marked and worthwhile difference, I felt, was in the increased naturalness in both the sound of instruments and voices, which seemed more organic, human and less ‘electronic’, and in the music’s rhythmical progression, which was also more natural and had the realistic ebb and flow that musicians exhibit when playing live. In short, recordings sounded more like musical performances then recordings.

As you can see the cables do not look anything special even though they are far more robust than the standard issue flat cables, and they are are irradiated, I am told, to vapourise any moisture that has found its way into the molecular structure of the conductors.

The photo here shows the original, Generation 1 cable but there is now a more advanced, wider bandwidth Generation 2 version that is soon going to be available from the same American manufacturer. They will, of course, be more expensive than ‘ordinary’ SATA cables – the red and grey insulated flat cables that come free with hard disks or sell for around £2.99. But their superior performance easily justifies the extra expense.

When I have a definite price on the new cables and the URL from which they will be able to be purchased, I will post the information here. I cannot wait: I only have one of the generation 1 cables and wanted a dozen more for other hard disks and SATA peripherals. Now there is a supposedly ‘better’ version I cannot wait to evaluate it and if it is, as I am told, substantially superior, get my order in for a dozen of those.

I think that we can all agree that the 'magic' cables are going to pass the same 0s and 1s as any working cable. Still, it is not impossible that the 'magic' cables result in better sound. Allow me to play devil's advocate.

For example, non-magic cables might produce EM fields that may interfere with the audio equipment generating the sound that the blogged was listening to. The magic cables, with better shielding, might not, and thus, despite transporting the same 0s and 1s, result in better quality.

I've been saying for years that there is a new kind of wrong-headedness that people in today's society apply to factual matters - that if they don't understand the reasoning behind a factual statement, then they just claim its a matter of opinion. I think this is overcompensation for when we were taught in 2nd grade that sometimes facts are actually opinions. Well, the less intelligent among us have extended that to mean "sometimes things you don't understand and make factually incorrect statements about are 'just opinions'

Everyone is welcome to an opinion, but certain matters aren't a matter of taste. Example:

"Red is better than green." This is an opinion because you could like red or green or whatever color with essentially no justification and nobody questions you on it, because its purely a matter of taste.

"The color red has a wavelength of around 300nm" would be a factually incorrect statement, not a matter of opinion. Red has a wavelength thats more like 550-650nm or something like that... I wanna say 300nm is violet or ultraviolet. (I might be wrong on that one, but it still illustrates the point). Some people never learned the difference between "A factually untrue statement" and "an opinion." And 'magical cables make sound better!' is a factually untrue statement, not an opinion. It just takes more verification than the average jerk audiophile can be bothered with.

Disclaimer: My expertise is audio design/engineering, so the above comments may be tainted with objective fact.

And high-end digital cables are continued proof of this! I'm perfectly happy to pay $5 extra for a better cable so it won't actually break on me, or has a handy elbow bend in the connector, or whatnot (OK, maybe a bit more for a really long cable). Beyond that it's pure fraud.

The CD player reads the bits off the CD much like reading a CD-ROM, but there's a ton of CRC/ECC data. There's really no magic there at all. Most (all recent) CD players spin fast enough to oversample each region, in case of a bad CRC, but if the ECC works there's nothing left for the CD player to do at this stage.

There's a quality difference in DACs: a good DAC makes a difference, but it's subtle and with cheap speakers you wouldn't notice. The chips for a good DAC run about $10, plus a large heat sink, p

High end digital cables are totally worth it, especially if they have pretty lights!;)

And titanium binary shielding to prevent bit leakage, drift, and collisions. When ALL the bits are travelling in the same direction with perfect coherency, the sound quality is so good it induces multiple orgasms even in males. I'd like to see a cable without binary shielding do that! And if its not titanium, it's crap. But that goes without saying.

Wine snobs usually have their opinions backed up by double-blind tests. The taste buds of good sommelier really can tell the type, vintage, and what kind of wood was used in the barrel that aged the wine. It was a blind test that proved that France wasn't the best in the world after all [wikipedia.org].

They might be snobs, but they do have some Scientific backing behind them. Audiophiles, not so much.

Super interesting Wikipedia article! You would think that if they were so good at it (the french judges) they could at least tell the difference between American and French grapes (even if they secretly found the American taste "Better")...

Actually, the snobs of both fields probably do have something in common: They enjoy spending money on things (Even if it's only for spending's sake)... Behold: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-9849949-39.html [cnet.com], a study that demonstrated the ability of something to be better (read: more enjoyable) so long as (and solely if) it is more expensive. Maybe the Audio guys aren't so crazy after all... Just deluded by their medial orbitofrontal cortex!

Indeed, the organizer of the competition, Steven Spurrier, said, "The results of a blind tasting cannot be predicted and will not even be reproduced the next day by the same panel tasting the same wines."[4] In one case it was reported that a "side-by-side chart of best-to-worst rankings of 18 wines by a roster of experienced tasters showed about as much consistency as a table of random numbers."[5][6]

Not much good in blind tests if there is no repeatability.Kinda like some tests of psychic powers out there, or homeopathy.

Not getting the same exact results every time would mean that the test is very imprecise but not necessarily inaccurate. If the averages work out over many samples so that some wines are clearly favored where others are not, it would still be significant even if you don't get the exact same results with every test.

Later on in the same article it is stated that statisticians analyzed the results and found that the top two wines were the only ones that was statistically different in ranking from the other on

Spoken like somebody who has never had a good bottle, or maybe you just don't like wine. For my part I have had $8 bottles that I have loved, and $40 bottles which I wanted to love (when something is more expensive you do *want* to like it) but in fact hated. Point being, price doesn't correlate with taste, and I rarely buy anything I know any background for so there is no prejudice there.

If you don't like the taste of wine generally that's just your problem, but don't assume that it cannot be enjoyed for its taste by others.

Quite frankly I'm not at all surprised that rankings would change day to day even by the same people. Taste is very tied to mood. People tend not to want to eat the same thing all the time, even when it's something they like.

The person from the northeast placed them "correctly" except swapping the $20 and $30 wine.

The people from texas tended to prefer the $20 wine the "top" wine.

The worst wine was rated lowest by over half the people there.

The 3rd wine (price wise) had a peculiar "oak" gripping the sides of the tongue that people either liked or disliked but everyone could sense.

My comment on the $62 Hess was "this tastes the most like the 'ideal' of cab sav" but I preferred the Estancia cabsav. It was sweeter on the tongue (not from sugar either- it was a weird sweetness.)

Our blind trial provided strong evidence that we could sense differences between the wines but adjacent cost bands tended to blend together and everything over $20 was "just darn good". The $35 Robert Mondavi was not as well liked as the $20 Estancia generally.

I paired the wine with high quality steak. Some wines pair "magically" with the right foods. The wine tastes better and the food tastes better.

That's not how it works. When someone makes a claim, they have to back it up, not the doubters. The audiophiles are making the claim that the more expensive cables create better sound. It's up to them to demonstrate this.

The skeptics make the claim that there's no way the expensive cables can affect the audio quality because the cables are digital. This doesn't require double-blind tests, or really any tests of any type, because you just have to show that the same data makes it out the other end with either cable, which is trivial to do.

That's not how it works. When someone makes a claim, they have to back it up, not the doubters. The audiophiles are making the claim that the more expensive cables create better sound. It's up to them to demonstrate this.

The skeptics make the claim that there's no way the expensive cables can affect the audio quality because the cables are digital. This doesn't require double-blind tests, or really any tests of any type, because you just have to show that the same data makes it out the other end with either cable, which is trivial to do.

You should still do that experiment double-blind. Otherwise you're just playing into the unscientific thinking.

This doesn't require double-blind tests, or really any tests of any type, because you just have to show that the same data makes it out the other end with either cable, which is trivial to do.

Unfortunately, this isn't the whole picture.

Its pretty much certain that the data passed by the cable is identical. But its not certain that that the electromagnetic field created by pushing the signal through the cable is not interfering with a nearby analog component, introducing noise or hum. A better shielded digital cable might well actually make a noticeable impact.

For example, I used to work on a computer that where I could hear a low level buzz from the speakers when the hard drive was working. Maybe a shielded cable would have made a difference... or repositioning the hard drive relative to the other components. Or maybe it was grounding issue or something... I didn't investigate it; it wasn't my computer.

This is actually accurate. I have a subwoofer now that hates my cheap HDMI cables but plays nicely with my extra shielded $50 ones. On the other hand they don't show any difference at all between my $50 well shielded cable and the one a friend of mine paid $200 for, and I am a bit of an audiophile, but I'm a cheap bastard on top of it so I always look for the exact reason something isn't quite right and go with the cheapest thing that will grant me my desired performance.

Basically the system had a grounding issue, probably a ground loop. Those things are the bane of my existence when doing audio. The answer though isn't to try and shield a cable, since the noise may well be induced through the ground itself, the answer is to clear up the problem. It can involve isolation of some sort, like an isolation transformer or moving a DAC outside of the computer. It can also involve getting audio devices that don't use a separate safety ground. You can get amps, receivers, etc that

That's not how it works. When someone makes a claim, they have to back it up, not the doubters. The audiophiles are making the claim that the more expensive cables create better sound. It's up to them to demonstrate this.

Don't you know? In today's scientific world all you need to do is get enough people to agree with you and ANY skeptic is instantly labeled a "denier" and must be required to prove their case.

Of course, no rigorous proof is required of the claimant, only a panel of his like-minded peers to affirm that he is right, and that there is a "consensus".

Now stop being a Super SATA cable denier, fork over your money like a good little sheeple and sit quietly.

I'm sure there are some clearly degenerate choices for barrels, but otherwise it's a matter of taste.

I took a tour of the Wollersheim Winery in Wisconsin a few months ago with a tasting. Their Domaine du Sac is advertised as being aged in oak barrels, and has won its share of awards. I hated it. It's smells like oak (which is nice), but also tastes like oak (which isn't). Clearly, some people would do like that, but it's not for me.

The problem is as they get older and (hopefully) more wealthy, their hearing is at the same time inevitably getting worse and worse. Before too long, their wealth easily eclipses their ability to hear and their ability to resist snakeoil like this. Salesmen score a slam-dunk appeal to ego as soon as they plug in a set of "unbelieveable, not just digital, SUPERDIGITAL" cables and laud the *obvious* improvement in sound. Not being able to hear a damn thing anyway, the audiophile quickly opens his wallet le

I particularly love his comment that the cables actually improved the naturalness in "the music&rsquo;s rhythmical progression".

In other words, the cable isn't just changing the timbre of the notes; mellowing the harsh electronic edges, reducing noise levels, and other mumbo-jumbo these things are usually claimed to do. It is actually changing the timing of the music, in other words editing the music as it flies down the cable! If I put one of these on my hard drive I could expect to find fewer typos in my code.

Offopic here. To be fair, there are at least three definitions of Christians that I know of:

1. One who professes to believe in Jesus Christ as a savior figure2. One who acts in a manner similar to who Jesus acted and lived, in his or her relationships with others.3. One who belongs to a church or denomination that directly descends from the original, ancient Christian church, such as Catholics, protestants, etc.

I know of many folks of different denominations who fit into #1, but not #2 (we might call these hypocrites, but hey everyone is to a point). I know lots of people of all faiths and beliefs, even non-"Christian" who fit #2. Heck I know some atheists that fit #2. So if someone claims to be a Christian, I take them at their word, and hope they, above all, fit in #2, because everything else follows that.

Those Denon cables look great, but there's some severe problems with them, mainly because they're so good, the transmission rate exceeds lightspeed. Check out this review from Amazon.com:

Transmission of music data at rates faster than the speed of light seemed convenient, until I realized I was hearing the music before I actually wanted to play it. Apparently Denon forgot how accustomed most of us are to unidirectional time and the general laws of physics. I tried to get used to this effect but hearing songs play before I even realized I was in the mood for them just really screwed up my preconceptions of choice and free will. I'm still having a major existential hangover.

Would not purchase again.

Even worse, you might experience much worse effects with these cables. This review is very ominous:

This connection isn't sound. If my calculations are correct, it should be sometime around 2007 for whomever is reading this. DO NOT USE THESE CABLES. Something... happens with them. Something came through, something from somewhere else. We were overrun in days, not many of us are left. WE LIVE UNDERGROUND! ONLY YOU CAN STOP IT NOW. SAVE US. DO NOT USE THESE CABLES.

I don't have much time. This connection isn't sound. If my calculations are correct, it should be--

Get the purest digital audio you've ever experienced from multi-channel DVD and CD playback through your Denon home theater receiver with the AK-DL1 dedicated cable. Made of high-purity copper wire, it's designed to thoroughly eliminate adverse effects from vibration (it stays plugged in!) and helps stabilize the digital transmission from occurrences of jitter and ripple (I just made that up!). A tin-bearing copper alloy (brass, idiots!) is used for the cable's shield while the insulation is made of a fluoropolymer material (for those awkward moments when you just dropped your cable into a puddle of battery acid) with superior heat resistance, weather resistance, and anti-aging properties. The connector features a rounded plug lever to prevent bending or breaking and direction marks to indicate correct direction for connecting cable (sound goes in direction of arrow).

"James Randi offered US$ 1 million to anyone who can prove that a pair of $7,250 Pear Anjou speaker cables is any better than ordinary (and also overpriced) Monster Cables. Pointing out the absurd review by audiophile Dave Clark, who called the cables 'danceable,' Randi called it 'hilarious and preposterous.' He added that if the cables could do what their makers claimed, 'they would be paranormal.'

If he has a really poorly designed motherboard and his old cables were really crappy(I.E had NO SHIELDING). The old SATA cables may have been injecting noise into the analog back end of the sound card.

Perhaps that's possible, but Steward is using those SATA cables on his NAS device, so the noise would also have to propagate across his network to the audio system.

On a side note, Steward is apparently making defamation claims against the folks discussing his blog:

Me: Hello?Him: Hey what HDMI cable should I buy?Me: The cheapest ones you can find?Him: Really? Because they have some for $30 and some for $90, aren't the $90 ones better?Me: Where are you?Him: Best Buy, they have the good stuff.Me: Just turn around and leave, buy them off the internet for $5, or at least go to Target or Walmart.Him: But they have some for $90 here, they wouldn't charge more if they weren't better.

I personally love how you can buy a DVD player at Best Buy for under $100, and then when you need a HDMI cable to hook it up? Over $100. Why does the cable that just sits there cost more than the DVD player it connects, when the DVD player has moving parts, a laser, and a remote control?

Where the comments section would be, we get this instead: "I have disabled Comments on this post so that respectable visitors do not have to read the remarks made by a small number of extremely ignorant, rude, malicious and disingenuous individuals who cannot tolerate people expressing opinions that do not concur with their own. "

Or in other words: "I have absolutely no fucking clue what I'm talking about and really don't like being corrected."

they are are irradiated, I am told, to vapourise any moisture that has found its way into the molecular structure of the conductors.

Into the molecular structure?!? Sure, the cable can have some random water or oxygen molecules sticking to it, and (infrared, I assume - ultraviolet or lower might just ionize them and cause *more* oxidation) irradiating may remove them. But if it's "in the molecular structure" it's already oxidizied the metal and irradiating it isn't going to do

I have disabled Comments on this post so that respectable visitors do not have to read the remarks made by a small number of extremely ignorant, rude, malicious and disingenuous individuals who cannot tolerate people expressing opinions that do not concur with their own.

Which really means "I'm an ignorant, lying, idiot, and dont want people pointing that out on my blog, so I have closed commenting and deleted all comments, since they all pointed out my stupidity."

Any sufficiently advanced scam is indistinguishable from blind ignorance.

It's pretty obvious that these cables are a scam preying on people who care about their sound systems but who don't understand enough of the technical aspects to avoid buying overpriced crap. This Stewart fellow is probably getting paid to plug this cable on his blog, but it's possible that he's just an idiot.

It's pretty obvious that these cables are a scam preying on people who care about their sound systems but who don't understand enough of the technical aspects to avoid buying overpriced crap.

But, it's worse than that.

Some of the people I've seen defending this stuff comes from audiophiles themselves. People who can recite the formulas related to the physics of speakers and audio-connections from memory. People who in theory could build a set of really good speakers and have likely built tube amps at some

You see it in all foods. I like vodka, some of the most expensive vodka is not very good. Grey Goose is a great example an American named Sidney Frank made it up and charged a lot for it so people would think it is good. It is in fact no better than a $20 a handle vodka. Corazón tequila is what they are now claiming is so great. Another average quality product sold at high grade prices.

While I would not expect that the drive cables should affect the audio in any way, I have been in hardware development long enough that when a software person makes some strange claim like"the circuit changed and I didn't do anything" that often there is something behind it. In short, these things are complex. Not that the cable should not make any difference. Maybe in his motherboard, the terminations are not good and the EMI in the board is affecting the audio. This cable may be a better match. I am not saying this is the case, but do not write off these things just because they do not make sense. That said, the writer should also try to replicate on several platforms etc etc

Reading TFA, he replaced the *SATA* cables on a *NAS*, which then sent the audio files over Ethernet to his network. I think it's pretty safe to write it off as an ignorant misunderstanding of digital electronics (by him, not you - you are just giving him WAAY too much credit:)

What the hell are you talking about? What terminations and EMI?? The cable connects the hard disk to the hard disk controller, it either does successfuly (like any $1 sata cable that is not broken) or does not (the broken cable), and from then on the audio data has to go get processed/decoded/whatever and at some point passed on the the Digital to Analog converter. ONLY FROM THEN ON does quality of electronics/cables etc matter.There are some things that are simple as 1-2-3 that you can certainly write off.

There was a./ article a few years ago - similar - about a $500 Ethernet cable made in "low oxygen" environments...yadda...yadda...sold to people to get better sound quality out of the MP3's.

All the same points were made, and shenanigans called.

There was a lot of interesting stuff said in the old discussion - a lot of it had to do with the fact that when people review this HiFi/Audio stuff - the testing is all very subjective, and is never done as a blind trial. Thus, one can boast the virtues of the $500 Ethernet cable - as they know they are listening through one - but one would never do a blind-sound test between a $500 and a $5 cable.

Maybe it was also meant to be purchased and used in a "low oxygen" environment. I'm sure the sound is much better when there isn't so much oxygen permeating your brain and impeding the high quality sound particles, etc.

Audiophiles are just dead convinced there are all sorts of magic ways to improve your sound quality. Sometimes it is just pure, 100% made up bullshit like the "brilliant pebbles" thing. Other times there is a kernel of truth from long in the past that they over apply to everything.

With digital cable, that's the case. So S/PDIF is the major transport for digital audio. It is slowly being superseded by newer things but it was the big one forever and is still used a lot. Turns out S/PDIF isn't all that well designed with regards to having a solid clock signal. So what happened was back in the day (and still occasionally) you'd have devices that didn't reclock an incoming signal, they use the clock off of the wire. This meant they were sensitive to clock skew, which would happen if your cable wasn't tightly controlled to 75 ohms, in particular with a long distance. The kind of distortion caused by this is quite audible. S/PDIF has no real error correction, and no retransmit so any errors get played. Thus, for long runs (as you find in studios) good cable was needed, even for digital.

Obviously there are a lot of ways around this, the most common these days being just reclocking the signal you receive with an internal clock. Also better standards came about (like AES/EUB which runs over balanced cable). Doesn't matter, once and for all time people were convinced that cable quality mattered. It still crops up too, because you get audiophile devices that are poorly designed. They go for a "minimal component" design. So you'll have a DAC that doesn't reclock and thus is sensitive to clock skew.

Of course snake oil salesmen seized on this and started selling "high grade" cables that offered nothing.

Now of course when you get to SATA, none of this shit matters because it isn't a synchronous, no-retransmit system. If an error happens, the data will be resent. This is easy to do since everything is operating so much faster than the audio signal, and is further buffered by the system. If there are any errors on the wire, you never know, the system handles it behind the scenes. Also none of it affects the analogue audio signal, as it isn't clocked and converted until it hits the soundcard. Internal to the CPU, it is all just data.

That's quite an informative post about the S/PDIF protocol. But I suspect the cable quality debate harkens from a period where the signal sent to speakers and between devices was analog. In which case, signal degredation and interference was in fact an issue.

But at this point, manufacturing processes are so solid that even coat hangers sound as good as any "high fidelity" speaker cables. Which is to say that the real worth of any speaker cable irrespective of marketing and street price is probably only slig

Cables cannot cause clock skew, because again long term the cable would have to somehow create or delete samples and a cable just can't do that. Cables can cause jitter, but the effect is vastly overstated.

Not reclocking data is a better way to deal with skew than reclocking is. Because if you reclock you have to drop samples or resample to deal with the long-term drift between the input clock and the reproduction clock.

Jitter on the input data can show up if you go straight to a DAC. But you can redesign y

There seem to be a lot of/. discussions about obviously stupid things. The comment thread fills up with people competing for the Score 5 (funny) comments. What's the point here, other than ego stroking and karma boosting? Inflated senses of superiority?
Now before anyone answers, I've got some Super SATA stock to liquidate.

There seem to be a lot of/. discussions about obviously stupid things.

The subject may be "obviously stupid" to you, but perhaps others have interesting things to add. I've already read some informative and insightful comments in this thread about audio/video cables, interference, hum, etc., which I would not have learned had I decided that the discussion was too "obviously stupid" to follow.

The comment thread fills up with people competing for the Score 5 (funny) comments. What's the point here, other than ego stroking and karma boosting?

"Competing"? Why do you think it's a competition? Maybe an amusing thought just popped into their head and they decided to share it. Obviously some people enjoyed them or they wouldn't have been moderated "Funny". You seriously need to get over yourself.

If the delivered analog voltage always delivers the exact 100% same 1s and 0s, then it delivers 1s and 0s.

SATA cables can be grouped according to their transmission quality - class A SATA cables (the usual ones) deliver 100% quality; class B SATA cables deliver less than 100% quality, so they don't work and you throw them back at the shop for a replacement.

Since when does a SATA cable deliver 1s and 0s? It delivers an analog voltage, that happens to be determined as a 1 or 0 by noise thresholds. They could be making a better cable, the problem is once you meet the noise margins for this digital interpretation all extra improvement are for nothing.

That's what an electrical/computer engineer, when actually doing their job and not just trying to show off to non-engineers, calls "digital". Every digital electric circuit is an analog voltage that happens to be determined to be a 1 or 0 as long as it is within a threshold. That's what it means to be a (binary) digital circuit. It's why it's advantageous, because you either meet the threshold or you don't. And when it doesn't happen, we call that "failing". Heck, thanks to the nature of digital signaling, you can even use error correction codes, tolerate some amount of failure, and still recover 100% of the data.

So as long as you presume that "SATA cable" has an implied "functional" modifier, then it's fair to say it's delivering 1s and 0s.

Furthermore... if there is some gigantic RF source that’s screwing up the data crossing your SATA cable, you have worse things to worry about than something a fancy SATA cable will fix.

In fact, DON'T MOVE. Someone might have accidentally installed a 110 kilovolt power line directly through the room you're in, or, alternately, you might have set up your sound system around one of those. Very carefully look around around the room you're in, or around the tower you're at the top of, to see if you can

Since both are carrying digital data, how is one stream of digital data any better?

Electrical hookup vs optical hookup isn't just digital vs digital. You have to consider grounding effects too. If the base signal is identical but you remove a source of mains hum by breaking a ground loop you can have a very audible improvement.

If the base signal is identical but you remove a source of mains hum by breaking a ground loop you can have a very audible improvement.

But that mains hum would have to enter *after* the digital->analog conversion, no? So the cable still wouldn't matter, unless you're saying that the cable itself is transferring hum from the dvd player to the analog amp.

Ya know, I'm in the live entertainment biz and folks that have come from the computer world don't have near the ground problems as the stereo jockies. We just put everything behind two UPS with an autoswitcher in the middle and never looked back. Of course all of our stuff is HD-SDI so it either works or it doesn't. Grounds loops don't matter when you are digital as that interference won't mean anything to the decoder which wouldn't ever have the opportunity to receive said interference as the interface con

Correct. High speed digital signals actual have a lot of analog related physical issues. The field is generally called (digital) Signal Integrity [wikipedia.org], and one of the better known experts is Dr. Howard Johnson [signalintegrity.com].

You have to consider grounding effects too

If you mean shielding and/or signal termination, then yes.

If the base signal is identical but you remove a source of mains hum by breaking a ground loop you can have a very audible improvement.

Sorry, but mains hum should be rejected by as always being below the noise threshold in a well design digital system. That's one of the most widely cited reasons for usage of digital signal processing of what are naturally continuous analog signals (e.g. audio, RF (mostly), visible and non-visible light/radiation).

In a classic digital system, the logic levels have a wide margin sepearing the two digital states. Say in a 0-5V TTL logic, common from the 1970s to 1980s. As long as the digital signal says outside the "dead band" around 2.0V (from memory), while a digital bit is either 0.0V (or very close to it) or 5.0V (or very close to it), so the noise from the AC mains hum (50-60 Hz) will not distort the signal enough to swap logic levels.

Unless the interference is happening after the D-A conversion...I have this issue with my desktop computer, which is why I switched to a USB headset, issue gone. Thos AC97 chips are terrible, I wish they would burn in hell and bring back discrete sound cards. I miss the decent sound cards you used to be able to get.

The reason is that most optical cable you get is plastic, POF cable. It is great because it is flexible, durable, cheap, and can be made the size of the TOSlink opening. The problem is it is lossy as hell. Really poor transmission characteristics. Well this matters not at all when your DVD player sits on top of your receiver, as is so often the case. However if you have a setup where the devices are far apart, sometimes you discover that it doesn't work at all, or you get dropouts. You can, of course, repla

This implies that there are single bit errors in digital cables. There are not. They necessarily have error correction built in. When talking about something like a SATA cable, even a single bit error in a transmission is capable of crashing a system and causing catastrophic data loss. Any system that's used for hard drives REQUIRES absolutely ZERO uncorrected data errors ever. The iSCSI protocol, which essentially channels hard drive data over an Ethernet connection, has an enormous amount of buffering and

If your SATA cables are working as they should, then the sequence of 0s and 1s your computer reads into memory is exactly the same as the sequence stored on the disk. You can't improve on that.

If you SATA cables aren't working as they should, then the sequence of 0s and 1s will be different -- but as your quote pointed out, this would affect everything. The cable doesn't know whether it's transmitting a WAV, an MP3, a JPG, or an EXE. If your cables are corrupting data, your computer probably won't even boot!

But, as the quote also pointed out, there are systems in place to detect and correct errors. Even if your cables are corrupting data, it's extremely unlikely that your computer will think it's getting the correct data and proceed to play it. Instead, it will retry, and the symptoms you'll see are slow or stalled transfers (just like a bad network connection).